Animal movement and associated infectious disease risk in a metapopulation.

Animal movements among habitat patches or populations are important for maintaining long-term genetic and demographic viability, but connectivity may also facilitate disease spread and persistence. Understanding factors that influence animal movements is critical to understanding potential transmission risk and persistence of communicable disease in spatially structured systems. We evaluated effects of sex, age and infection status at capture on intermountain movements and seasonal movement rates observed in desert bighorn sheep () using global positioning system collar data from 135 individuals (27 males, 108 females) in 14 populations between 2013 and 2018, following a pneumonia outbreak linked to the pathogen in the Mojave Desert, California, USA.